Artist Shops Design System

A design system for Threadless' Artist Shops platform to establish design consistency and standards.

ForThreadless RoleProduct Design Intern

The Problem

The Artist Shops was a new platform created by Threadless. As the platform was evolving it became difficult to keep the design of Artist Shops consistent between the design, brand, and engineering teams.

I saw an opportunity to standardize the design of Artist Shops by creating a design system in Sketch. This would also allow all teams to create ideas and mockups in Sketch with the proper components, typography, colors, and images.

The Process

I started by opening an Artist Shop and exploring all areas of the platform. As I was navigating I was documenting all the various colors, typography, components, logos, images, and icons used.

After that, I met with the brand, design, and engineering team to resolve any areas where there was inconsistency of design patterns. This way the platform could have an agreed upon set of design standards.

Once I compiled all the assets from the platform and had consensus between the various teams. I made a Sketch document to showcase all the design pieces that make up Artist Shops. Then I turned all those pieces into symbols within Sketch. This way they could be referenced and reused easily from within the file for mocking up/prototyping ideas.

The Result

I was able to standardize design patterns between teams for Artist Shops. That allowed the design library to act as the foundation for the platform moving forward. The Sketch file with all the different symbols allowed for teams to explore new ideas faster by having access to all the various components of Artist Shops instead of searching through old files looking for assets.

Here's a demo of how the Sketch file works with all the components of the Artist Shops platform.